Electronic commerce on the Internet generally can be organized into two categories, database driven applications and indexing or information portal services. Database driven applications can be further categorized as either transactional or non-transactional applications. Auction sites such as ebay™ are non-transactional database driven applications in that transactions are external to the ebay system and between third party participants that use the system, i.e., ebay as a web site and on-line commerce application does not process payment information or require payment information to participate in the system. Ebay type non-transactional systems are a source of dynamic pricing information.
Transactional database driven applications, among others, such as those disclosed, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,845,265 to Woolston, provide that a site may process payment information associated with the transaction and may further provide surety to the Internet customer that the site is providing transactional and/or performance assurances about participants in the system. Transactional database driven applications are also a source of dynamic pricing information.
Both non-transactional and transactional systems are database driven applications that contain dynamic pricing information in a database that is encouraged to rapidly change—that is, the content about the item for sale or offers to buy, or bid are stored in a database and not, for example, in a static web page format. These systems are dynamic in that the database content, for example, a bid at an auction, is or is encouraged to rapidly change. Further dynamic information content is provided by the transient nature of the dynamic transactions themselves, i.e., an auction for a particular item eventually terminates and bid and ask pricing for a particular good or service eventually expires.
The dynamic nature of such database driven web sites present an indexing problem for the second category of electronic commerce related site such as the search engine or information portal. Take for example the Yahoo™ or Altavista™ search engines which, in general, use web crawlers to search the web for indexable content, such as static web pages. Owing, at least in part, to the large and expanding amount of information available on the web, it is understood that its takes even the most efficient web crawler based system several days to crawl and index the resources on the web. Thus, the problems associated with indexing a database driven application are two-fold. First, the database must be subject to a properly formed search request to retrieve the content of the database. Second, the content in database driven applications is dynamically changing, i.e., a link to an auction in progress, for example, may have terminated and may present a dead link soon after a search system indexes the information. Furthermore, the content of the database presents an instance of dynamic pricing which changes too rapidly for an informational portal to index by conventional methods.
Some attempts have been made to ameliorate the problem of indexing dynamic pricing information, such as allowing individual participants to index information at the informational portal site to point to dynamic content at a database driven application. Another attempt to ameliorate the indexing problem is through private arrangement between the operators of a database driven application and the informational portal site to index dynamic content through application program interfaces. This piecemeal approach is not automated outside of private relationships, if they exist, and still presents the problem of dead links and the like after an auction is complete or a bid dynamically changes or expires. Furthermore, the piecemeal solution does not provide a systemic way to solve the fundamental problems that arise in indexing and searching for instances of dynamic data.
Another class of web sites, the so-called comparison shopping sites or bots, attempt to address the dynamic content indexing issue by imposing another layer that purportedly bridges multiple dynamic shopping sites. These sites require a search request be entered at the central site and the search request is parsed and distributed to multiple sites in a predetermined search format. These sites, thus, purport to make the searching process more efficient by automatically searching a plurality of sites. This type of comparison site, however, does not address the fundamental problem of indexing dynamic content to populate search services for indexable searching by participants. In contrast, they merely impose another layer of complexity on top of multiple dynamic pricing systems.
Another class of services that attempts to address the problem of dynamic pricing information is found in the financial art such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,501, to Silverman and assigned to Reuters Limited and its family of related patents. This technology does not address the problem of indexing non-financial instances of dynamic pricing and it does not present a consistent navigational or taxonomy scheme to navigate and find pricing information in a heterogeneous computing environment and found on the Internet, i.e., the Reuters system uses private relationships between the parties to exchange information about dynamic pricing.